


Begin With Love

by sophiahelix



Category: Yentl (1983)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Judaism, Menstruation, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 12:12:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8890321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/pseuds/sophiahelix
Summary: Her husband had his monthly courses today.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kmo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/gifts).



> Thank you for the lovely prompt and I hope you enjoy this! I've marked it as "canon divergence" because it hews closely to the movie (and uses a lot of dialogue) but veers off in a new direction for the ending.

_Speak words which arouse her to love, desire, and passion,_  
_and words of reverence for G-d._  
_Never force her._  
_Her mood must be as yours._  
_Win her with graciousness and seductiveness._  
_Be patient until her passion is aroused._  
_Begin with love._  
_And when her mood is ready,_  
_let her desire be satisfied first._  
_Her delight is what matters._  
\- Nachmonides, the Holy Letter 

 

*****

 

Her husband had his monthly courses today.

Hadass had been reading ahead in the Mishnah. They had not yet come to the Tohorot, the long and complicated discourse on purity and uncleanliness, but she had been dull one afternoon and, pleading headache to her mother, had escaped to her room. There she had paged past the thick leather bookmark in the middle that marked their place until her eye was caught by the Niddah, the tractate on uncleanliness in women.

Her own courses had come upon her in her fourteenth summer. She remembered the hot shame of staining through two stiff petticoats, and the look her mother had given her father as she drew Hadass from the breakfast table, shaking her head. 

_You're a woman now_ , her mother had said, as the servant stripped Hadass in the bath. _A woman must know certain things._

Not to enter the synagogue, except on High Holy days. Not to light or touch the Sabbath candles. Not to allow intercourse with her husband, when she should be a woman grown. 

Hadass was well accustomed to rules. One did as one's father said, as one's mother did, and especially as one was told by the Talmud. Rules for cooking, rules for cleaning, and now rules for this strange and unsettling flow of blood, painless today but, her mother told her, certain to be accompanied by aches tomorrow. It made Hadass feel safe, in truth, that this surprising new thing her body did should be governed by rules too.

They came from a different book, a small one kept separate in her father's library. Hadass had read it at her mother's behest, frowning over the parts about her blood's unholy powers. The book said it was fatal to those who drank it, that a _niddah_ passing between two men might kill them both, that a menstruating woman looking in the mirror would see drops of red in her reflection. 

Hadass looked, once. All she saw was her own face. 

The day she looked through Anschel's Talmud, she was surprised to see nothing about fatal draughts or bloodstained reflections, or even the prohibition against entering the temple. It contained only the simple rule that a _niddah_ may not have intercourse with her husband for seven days after the cessation of bleeding, and no less than twelve days after its beginning. 

There was nothing at all about a man's courses. 

But Anschel bled too, that much Hadass knew. There was an odor of burnt cloth about him every month which she had not been able to place, until the time she found a forgotten rag in the bath chamber, stained dark with fresh blood. She had noticed, too, that at times he seemed to be in pain, doubling over and pressing a hand, surreptitiously, to his lower belly. Hadass brought him raspberry tea at these times, or a hot cloth from the kitchen, and pretended not to notice when he moved it away from his shoulders and under his prayer shawl.

No one had ever spoken of men's courses, in Hadass's hearing. She had never observed them in her father, but then his body was largely strange to her, unknown. Truly, Hadass had never much considered men's bodies before her marriage. There was the strength in Avigdor's shoulders that had excited her, and then the gentleness in Anschel's face that had calmed her. The world of men was separate, mysterious. Perhaps they did not discuss women's courses amongst themselves, either. 

She helped Anschel in small ways, trying not to let her knowledge be known. Her husband told her many things, often surprising ones, but there was still so much of his mind that was closed to her. She sometimes thought she would never even have known the bounds of her ignorance if it weren't for Anschel himself, acting as though she had a right to question him, to think about him as a person and not simply her husband. He spoke to her as a man spoke to a man, and sometimes as a woman spoke to a woman, blunt compliments about her cooking or her needlework with no barb or hidden meaning, just simple admiration. 

Today she was preparing a roast chicken in the way that Anschel liked best. She pushed sprigs of thyme and rosemary under the well-oiled skin and filled the pan with potatoes and crushed garlic, pungent and strong. Anschel would notice the herbs, and the fennel tucked in with the vegetables. Anschel sometimes noticed everything, and sometimes noticed nothing.

She sang as she braided the challah, humming quietly to herself. Flour danced in the air, caught in a beam of morning sunlight, and she felt at peace in the kitchen, preparing food to last through the Sabbath. Yesterday had been the last of her white days, the seventh after the end of her bleeding, and she had gone to the _mikveh_ baths with her cousin, purifying herself for when she should be ready for intercourse again, if she chose. _A blessing on the Sabbath_ , her mother had said. 

Anschel did notice the garlic, and the fennel, but it was only to pick them out and push them aside, his fine-boned face twisted in slight disgust. Hadass felt foolish for forgetting; she had noticed her husband seemed to be put off by strong flavors in the early days of his courses. She offered him potatoes instead, and soft white bread, and he accepted both with gratitude and a smile. For a moment she thought he would touch her, caressing her hand or her face, but instead he cleared his throat and turned away.

He had returned from the Friday night shul pale and drawn, and when the meal was finished he retired upstairs. Hadass rose to make him a cup of raspberry tea, avoiding her mother's eyes. In the bedroom she found Anschel at study as usual, chewing his thumbnail as he pored over the heavy volume.

Anschel looked up when she entered, his eyes dim at first, far away in the cloudy heights of thought, and then focusing on her for a moment before looking down again. He did not stretch out an unthinking hand for the tea, as her father would've done, but neither did he do as he would have done months before, rising quickly to take the cup and setting it down with a rattle and a clatter. She thought he must have been unused to being waited on, a poor student like himself, but she wondered at his mother, and his sisters, if he'd had any. There was so much she didn't know about her husband.

Tonight Anschel murmured thanks as she placed his tea on the desk, eyes moving quickly over the lines of text before him. Hadass lingered a moment, questions on her tongue, before choosing to hold them for a better time. When Anschel studied, his mind journeyed far away, and recalling him was slow and difficult. It was always better to wait, to give him time to close his books and tie up the loose ends of thought and argument, premise and response, before speaking to him of earthly things. There was so much she had learned about her husband.

Hadass slipped behind the screen and began to undress. 

"Mother and Father are going to visit friends on Tuesday night," she said. 

"Oh?" Anschel said.

"You could invite Avigdor for dinner," she said.

"Oh," he said.

Hadass pressed her lips together, as she drew her nightdress over her head. The plan had come into her head this morning, as she shaped the soft, rising dough with her hands. She strained to hear the shades of inflection contained in that one word, to divine Anschel's thoughts. They were often secret, but sometimes as clear as a pane of glass.

An ordinary man in his position would have been jealous of Avigdor, his predecessor in Hadass's heart. From their wedding night forward, Anschel had never seemed so. Yet there was pain in his voice when he spoke of Avigdor, a kind of fierce trembling in his eyes, and sometimes Hadass even felt she recognized it, a twin to the fast-beating creature that lived in her own breast when Avigdor was near.

"Will you invite him?" she asked, finishing with the ties of her gown.

"Yes," Anschel said.

Hadass came out from behind the screen and got into bed, pulling the covers up to her chin. She heard Anschel undressing, and when he stepped out she opened her eyes the tiniest fraction, watching him as he bent to push a bundle wrapped in clean rags beneath the bed, next to the chamber pot. His courses seemed lighter than hers, always finished within a few days instead of going on and on.

When Anschel was in bed and the light dimmed but not extinguished, lest they need to kindle it again on the sabbath, Hadass spoke.

"Are men's monthly courses shorter than women's?"

"What?" Anschel asked, after a pause.

"I looked in the Talmud, but it didn't say."

"The Talmud doesn't say because everyone knows," Anschel replied, quick and smooth now, secure as always when he spoke of the law.

"The Talmud talks about lots of things everyone knows."

"Anyway, it's, er, not polite to discuss them," Anschel said, as if he hadn't heard.

"It's not?"

"You ever hear your father talk about them?"

"No."

"Well, there's your answer."

Hadass was silent, thinking. The answer seemed complete, but it did not satisfy, somehow. But Anschel sounded so sure, and it was difficult to know how to argue against his logic.

"Good night, Hadass," Anschel said, and there was finality in his tone.

He had never sounded so, when they were first married. But he had grown a quiet strength which comforted her, even though it gave her the perverse desire, sometimes, to shake him and see if he would bend.

"Good night," Hadass said quietly.

On Tuesday she made Avigdor's favorite fish, and the almond cookies that Anschel liked best. Her parents left in the forenoon, and she had the rare, welcome feeling of being mistress of her own home, having charge of the kitchen, everything a reflection of her own fitness and skill. She laid the table herself, rearranging the linen and silver twice, and ordered fresh flowers for every room. She had the sense of the house being an extension of her own self tonight, and she wished it to be warm and pleasant, sweet and inviting.

Anschel returned home from yeshiva and bathed in the afternoon, which he never did. Hadass bathed afterward, and noted there was no blood in the water. His courses truly were shorter and lighter than hers, and she wondered if it was being a man. The curse of Eve was a heavy one.

She returned to their room to dress, pulling on stockings and underskirts behind the screen. Anschel came in, and she could see him pacing back and forth before the window, peering out every so often into the street below. She watched him through the crack in the screen, pulling out his pocket watch every minute or so, smoothing his hair behind his ears in the mirror.

"He's one second late," she said, fastening her bracelet.

"Hm?" Anschel asked. "Oh, yes."

"I read a beautiful story today," she said, arranging her skirts.

"Really?"

"Yes, David and Jonathan," she said, and waited.

"Oh," Anschel said. "Yes, it's a -- nice story."

"Their love was even stronger than a man and a woman's," she said, slipping on a ring. She looked in the mirror.

"I -- thought you were reading the book of Job," Anschel said, and she heard him shifting around, saw his shadow move as he sat.

Hadass leaned around the screen to smile at Anschel, fiddling with the chess pieces on the table before him. "I finished it yesterday."

Anschel smiled back at her, weakly, distracted. She leaned behind the screen again. "That's wonderful," he said.

The doorbell rang. Her heart squeezed tight, every nerve in her body thrumming, but she made her voice low and sweet, dispassionate, as she asked "Who do you love more? Me or Avigdor?"

When she looked round the screen again, Anschel had gone.

She had read the story again after lunch, resting in her room as Sophie tidied the parlor. _I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me; wonderful was thy love to me, passing the love of women._

She thought of Anschel and his careful, kind words, the careful, kind way he avoided touching her at dinner, at night. She thought of the light that came into his eyes when he spoke of his studies, spoke of the boys at yeshiva, spoke of Avigdor. She thought of the way she had always trembled when Avigdor came into this house, how he'd seemed to fill every room, his broad shoulders everywhere she looked and his dark eyes always looking at her.

Hadass drew her skirts straight and went to descend the stairs, to where the men were waiting for her.

Dinner went smoothly, but there was an air of uneasiness, hesitation. It was strange to have a guest without her parents there, as if she were a little girl playing house again, and sometimes the conversation lagged, where her father or mother would have helped it along. Avigdor was quiet, watching them, and his eyes burned with something different than they ever had before. It tugged at her, but she turned to listen to her husband. 

"And then what happened?"

"Well, er, Avigdor was there too," Anschel said. "He'll tell you."

He got up to clear the plates after dinner; a strange, unaccustomed thing for him to do. Sophie or Hadass herself cleared the table. It left a silence in the dining room, a sense of a missing presence, and across the dining table Avigdor said to her, "Marriage agrees with you. You're more beautiful than ever."

The flush rose in her face, but it wasn't the trembling fire of days gone by. She lifted her skirts and moved quickly to sit next to him. "I'm concerned about Anschel."

Avigdor looked at her with confusion, his sweet words gone from his lips. "What are you talking a about?" he began, but then the hinges of the kitchen door creaked, and they both look up.

Anschel came back into the room with a tray in his hands, looking awkward and diffident. "I thought we could have tea in the parlor."

He served Avigdor tea, or tried. Hadass took the teapot from him, gently, after he spilled and clattered it against a plate. It seemed that her heart beat with his, aching. She knew what it was to love, and to want, and to wait for some hope of return.

_And Jonathan caused David to swear again, for the love he had to him; for he loved him as he loved his own soul._

It had seemed to her, reading today, that Jonathan loved David more strongly, that the fire in his heart burned more keenly. The men began to read, to study, to argue aloud, and she could feel it, the way Anschel looked at Avigdor, the way Avigdor looked at her. 

But she thought to herself that she was not the girl Avigdor had loved, shy and trembling and unknowing. She had had her wedding night, strange as it was, and she had a husband, who was teaching her how to be a wife. Teaching her Talmud, too, but also how to be patient, to observe, to learn the ways of another, fitting herself to his needs and finding all the small ways in which he did the same. She felt a hundred years older than that girl who had spilled fish sauce on her mother's best tablecloth, serving a man she loved without truly knowing.

She knew Anschel. She knew how he took his tea, and the print of his finger as it traced a line of text, and where he put his folded glasses at night when in the morning they could not be found, but so much more than that, too. His kindness and his shyness, his wish to do good and his love of the Talmud, and the sweet unthinking laughter she could coax from him sometimes, soft and blithe as a girl's. She loved the crease of his brow as he frowned over a book late at night, and the clever, passionate words that sprang to his tongue when he was stirred. She loved the contrasts in him, the hidden, barely-suspected depths, the smoothness of his face and his slight body, the fires banked within.

She hummed, bent over her needlework, and listened to the men. Their words flowed over her like so much air, lost as she was in contemplation of this deep-springing love, this unexpected content. She had made a choice, her back against the wall, thinking she loved only one man, and after groping a long way in the dark had found herself in another, warmer light.

"It's no good," Avigdor said, the words bursting out. "I'm sorry. Excuse me." 

He got to his feet. "Avigdor," Hadass said, gently, knowing nothing could hold him. He had sensed the change in her, or the ways in which he was the same.

"Avigdor, wait!" Anschel said, and his voice was sharp, frantic. He got up and followed Avigdor into the hall, and Hadass followed them both, laying her needlework aside.

In the hall Avigdor jammed on his hat and coat and was gone through the door without another word, without ever looking back. Anschel stood as if struck dumb, and Hadass reached out to slip her hand into his, feeling it tremble as she did so. Such a small and delicate hand, with the pulse beating within. They watched the door close behind Avigdor.

They undressed quietly in their room, Hadass behind the screen. Anschel read a few pages as she brushed her hair before the mirror, watching him in the reflection. Her eyes followed the narrow slope of his shoulders, and his slender, pale neck, bent over his book.

She had brought Avigdor here tonight, for him. The words of David and Jonathan had repeated in her head, growing louder. She had thought, perhaps they love one another. Perhaps I am only between them, like the _niddah_ who passes between two men and leaves poison in her wake. 

She had watched them tonight, with downcast eyes that missed nothing. 

"Anschel," she said. "How many children do you want?"

He coughed. "The -- actual number? I don't think I've ever really..." He bent his head more, returning to his reading.

"He didn't make me tremble tonight," Hadass said. 

"Hm?"

"You did."

She let the words linger in the air, without turning around. She watched Anschel in the mirror, sitting upright now, narrow shoulders straight.

"Oh?" he said, at last, the word small and hushed.

"Yes," she said, and turned around. She smiled at him as she tucked her hair up under its cap, and rose from her stool, going to bed. She felt his eyes on her all the way across the room, the attention sharp and new. 

Hadass turned back the silken coverlet of her bed and laid down on it. Anschel was still looking at her, his eyes wide behind his round, gold-rimmed glasses, faint color in his cheeks. 

"Anschel," she said. "Won't you tuck me into bed?"

He swallowed. For a moment she thought he might not do as she asked, but then he rose from the chair and crossed the room to her. The light behind him caught the halo of short hair around his small, delicate head, and her eyes, half-closed, were drawn to the fullness of his mouth.

Anschel bent down, taking hold of the coverlet and pulling it up. Hadass lifted her arms to rest on top of it, and reached with one hand to cup his face, the fine line of his jaw. It was soft under her fingers, beardless as ever, and she saw his lips part, his eyes traveling down her arm and up her body, falling just short of her face. He kept hold of the edge of the coverlet, bending over her.

"What's even nicer," Hadass said, softly. "I made you tremble."

She hadn't, she knew, but he was trembling now, breathing fast. His face was warm against the palm of her hand, the color still in his cheek, and she thought they had never been this close, aware of each other's bodies in this way. By day they were husband and wife, living in the spheres of man and woman, layers of cloth and tradition between them, and at night five feet of air and floorboards kept them separate, after undressing behind the screen. It had been so easy to see him as the shape of what he seemed to be.

Hadass stroked the side of her thumb across Anschel's smooth cheek, and felt him swallow.

"What are you doing, Hadass?"

"I'm looking at you," she said. 

He didn't move away, his eyes still fixed somewhere below her chin.

"The Talmud does speak of things everyone knows," she said.

"What?" 

"You said men's courses were not written of because everyone knows about them. But why then are women's written of?"

"Oh," he said, and she felt the stiffness go through him, as though he might straighten up and pull away. She spoke quickly, strength coming into her voice.

"The Talmud speaks only of things which are true," she said. "So it only speaks of women's courses."

Anschel raised his eyes to hers at last. They were very beautiful, wide and blue, and she saw so much in them, the present and the future.

"I don't care much for children," Hadass said, slowly. "If we were not to be blessed with any -- surely you would not dispute our fate?"

"No," Anschel said, almost inaudibly.

"You love your studies," Hadass said. "And I love what makes you happy."

"You do?" Anschel asked.

"I do," she said. "Anschel, when you told me I could refuse you, you didn't tell me I could also demand you."

"Who told you that?" he asked, the words themselves trembling.

"The Talmud. I forget which page."

"63a and b," he said, unable to help himself, and she smiled in delight, seeing him fall for her small trap, his scholarship telling against himself.

"It is written, Anschel."

"You've been studying too hard," he said.

She smiled and shook her head. "You said to tell you when I knew what I wanted. I do."

Hadass pushed herself up on one elbow then, moving closer to Anschel. He started but didn't move away, his breath warm and shaky against her face. He inclined towards her a fraction, and then stopped.

"Wait," he said, so close to her mouth she could feel his lips move.

"Your white days," Hadass said. "I've thought of that."

"You have," Anschel breathed.

"Of course," she said. "A woman may not touch her husband during the period of _niddah_. It's very simple, Anschel -- I am not your husband."

She leaned up and kissed Anschel. Who kissed her back, with lips as full as her own, and reached down to touch her face with a hand as small and slender as her own, who made a low noise with a voice as high and soft as her own. Hadass felt her understanding of her husband grow and unfold like a flowering bud, encompassing so much that was new to her but always there, hidden and curled and waiting.

She pulled Anschel down to lie alongside her in bed. "Shall I still call you Anschel," she murmured.

Anschel whispered a name, and Hadass took it into her breast, keeping it close and safe, precious as a child.

"Teach me," Hadass said, dropping kisses.

"I don't know myself."

"Then we will learn together."

The candle burned low, and then went out, long before the first lesson was through.

In spring, Avigdor went to Gdansk, to a new yeshiva there. In summer they moved into their own house, new-built and clean, with empty bookshelves waiting to be filled. Hadass smiled at her husband over the breakfast table in the mornings, and when they studied at night they always drew the curtains.

**Author's Note:**

> I had to do a fair bit of internet research for this one, both religious texts and looking up contemporary cultural practices and beliefs. I made my best efforts and hopefully have represented things correctly!


End file.
